Michel Auder + Michael Stickrod, Laëtitia Badaut Haussmann, Heide Hinrichs, Vier5: Season Two: Follow the Mud

Artists: Michel Auder + Michael Stickrod, Laëtitia Badaut Haussmann, Heide Hinrichs, Vier5
Also: Julia Trotta, C. Spencer Yeh

Beeler Gallery at Columbus College of Art & Design presents Season Two: Follow the Mud. Organized as a series of “instances” in a process of accumulation, each instance is accompanied by an installation and activated by performances, screenings, and dialogs both at Beeler Gallery and beyond. The gallery remains open to the public between the instances. Various solo artist projects circulate and intersect as the gallery footprint expands throughout the five-month long season.

Paris-based artist Laëtitia Badaut Haussmann‘s project WATER is structured as an active score. Referring to water’s states from liquid to solid, from filtration to contamination, the artist is interested in how multiple voices from the past and the present materialize, in traversing various nodes: the disappearance of the Museum of Modern Art, Kamakura, Japan; the craft and design history of architect Charlotte Perriand during World War II; a performative tour of Glenbrow / Gunning House, a 1940 Usonian-style house in Blacklick, OH, built by sculptor Tony Smith, Theodore van Fossen (known for Rush Creek Village, Worthington, OH), and Laurence Cuneo; and a collaboration and dialog with curator and writer Julia Trotta, to present an installation of video vignettes of Forget to be afraid: A Portrait of Linda Nochlin, a film on her late grandmother, the pioneering art historian, known for her 1971 article “Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists?”.

The collaborative project Staples and Rubber Bands of Ohio-based artist Michael Stickrod and New York-based French artist Michel Auder include sculptural installations by Stickrod that set the scene in the gallery for the viewers of Auder’s video works, including May ’68 in ’78, never-before-seen interviews on the reverberation of the student movement in France in 1968, shot 10 years after. Also on view is Michel Auder’s Cleopatra (1970), which based its characters’ improvisation on Joseph Mankiewicz’s 1963 version of the film that starred Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton. Auder’s cast included many in the milieu of Andy Warhol’s factory, including Auder’s former wife Viva as the queen, Louis Waldon, Taylor Mead, Nico, Ondine, Ultra Violet, Andrea Feldman, Gerard Melanga, and Christopher Walken.

Brussels-bassed German artist Heide Hinrichs presents a series of drawings as part of second shelf, a multi-institutional collaborative book acquisition project that she initiated in 2018 at Royal Academy of Fine Arts, Antwerp, Belgium, with partners Beeler Gallery / Packard Library at Columbus College of Art & Design, and University of Bristol, UK. As part of the process of publishing a future book on the project, Beeler Gallery / Packard Library and these partner institutions will participate in the Classroom Series at NY Art Book Fair at MoMA PS1 on September 20, 2019.

The graphic identity for Season Two: Follow the Mud is by Vier5, the graphic design team known for their irreverent take on design for institutional communication and their work for the quinquennial contemporary art exhibition documenta 14. Their collaboration with Beeler Gallery is their first American project. Writing on the Instances with Laëtitia Badaut Haussmann will be conducted by Daniel Marcus. Writing on the Instances with Michel Auder + Michael Stickrod will be conducted by Robert Slifkin. 

Season Two: Follow the Mud is conceived by Jo-ey Tang, and co-curated with Ian Ruffino and Marla Roddy.

Schedule
Instance No. 0: September 20, 2019, 1–2pm, second shelf, shelf talk #8; NY Art Book Fair, Classroom Series, MoMA PS1 (off-site)
Instance No. 1: October 10, 2019, 6–8pm, Season Two: Follow the Mud opening; sound performance by C. Spencer Yeh
Instance No. 2: October 13, 2019, 1–4pm, Laëtitia Badaut Haussmann: EXPOSURE; Gunning House / Glenbrow, Blacklick, OH (off-site)
Instance No. 3: November 10, 2019, 12–6pm, Michel Auder + Michael Stickrod present May ’68 in ’78
Instance No. 4: November 19, 2019, 6–7:30pm, Laëtitia Badaut Haussmann invites Julia Trotta, presenting Forget to be afraid: A portrait of Linda Nochlin
Instance No. 5: December 12, 2019, 6–8pm , Michel Auder + Michael Stickrod present Cleopatra (1970)
Instance No. 6: January 30, 2020, 6–8pm, Michel Auder + Michael Stickrod present Subversive Historian (2019) 
Instance No. 7: February 1, 2020, 2–3pm, Heide Hinrichs and second shelf
Future Instances to be announced, with Vier5 and the 2nd edition of An Art Book Affair.

Support
Beeler Gallery is supported by Greater Columbus Arts Council, Ohio Arts Council, The Skestos Endowment Fund for Visiting Artists & Lectures, and Brioso Coffee. Laëtitia Badaut Haussmann: WATER is supported by the Cultural Services of French Embassy in the United States and is realized in co-production with Musée d’art contemporain de la Haute-Vienne, France. Instance No. 3—Laëtitia Badaut Haussmann: EXPOSURE is presented in partnership with EXPO CHICAGO and with media sponsor Art in America. Downtown Art Sunday media sponsor: Columbus Underground.